The United States only ranked #16 in the 2022 World Happiness Report, while Finland was #1 for the fifth year in a row

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last week was the tenth anniversary of the World Happiness Report. It uses survey data to report how people rank their level of happiness in almost 150 countries on a scale from zero to ten. You can download the 2022 report here. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The bar chart above shows the Top 20 happiest countries, and also selects five others. The Top Ten are Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, Israel, and New Zealand. Surprisingly five of the Top Ten are Nordic countries, and 14 of the Top 20 are in Europe. The United States is #16, just behind our northern neighbor Canada (#15). Our other neighbor, Mexico, is way down at #46. Four others with relatively low scores are #46 Japan, #72 China, #80 Russia, and #136 India.        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finland was #1 for five years in a row. Another bar chart compares the rankings for Finland and the United States over the ten surveys. We have been as high as #11 in 2012, and as low as #19 in 2019. On March 25, 2019 I blogged about how According to the 2019 World Happiness Report, Americans are not exceptionally happy.

 

The cartoon with a happy couple comes from pdf page 35 of Punch magazine from July 1920, found here at the Internet Archive.